Are flushable wipes actually flushable?

- Hello, search engine listeners. An announcement before we start the show, we are hosting our first ever finders salon in New York City on March 20th. What's the salon? That's a question I've been asking myself ever since I wrote on a website that finders are highest paid tier listeners that people I would least like to disappoint would be invited to one and exclusive one that I was going to host. So what's the salon? Well, I finally looked it up. It turns out that in the 19th century in Paris, when people wanted to discuss the ideas of the day, sometimes they'd meet at somebody's house and discuss those ideas. It was like a book club, but without a book everybody was pretending to have read. It was like a podcast, except nobody recorded it. Trees falling soundlessly in the forest. What is our salon going to be? If you're a finder, you get to find out. Here's what I can promise. It's not a podcast live show where I'm on stage laughing like a stupid chipmunk and it will be big. It will be a small intimate group. We'll meet somewhere interesting. There'll be cheese, there'll be wine. And yes, you can bring a friend. If you want to join us for our inaugural salon, in which we will definitively answer together the question, what is a salon? Join us in New York City on March 20th. If you are now or at any point in the past, if you have been a finder, you will have gotten an email inviting you. If you are not a finder and if you would like to become one, if you join by February 14th Valentine's Day, you will get an email invitation to our first ever salon. You can join by going to search engine.show, signing up for incognito mode and choosing finder. All right, after these ads are show this week. (upbeat music) (dramatic music) - Okay, I never know how to start these things. So I'll just say, hey, PJ. - Hey, what do you have, do you have a story for me today? - I have a story for you today. It's a story about a question that we've actually received a few times at search engine. - What is the question? - So it's a question that I'd seen float around the internet before, but it had never really grabbed my attention in any real way. - I think it seemed like a question that would work really well as a New York Post Headline, but I wasn't sure there was much more to it. - Is it not a Hutton? - And they're Biden? - No, it's about flushable wipes. - It's not a New York Post Headline. - You're reading a different New York Post than I am. So this question just never jumped out to me, but there was something about having received the same question many times that at least put it on my radar. And then we get the question in an email from a guy named Egan. - You sent us an email a few months ago now, and I'm wondering if you could just read that email to us? - Yeah, no, you just want me to read it for a bit. - Yeah, you can read it for a bit. - Okay, yeah, so my question is, can I flush flushable wipes or not? Every package in the store is trying very hard to convince me that I can. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone on the internet said not to, so who do I believe? - And can I ask, like, do you use these? Have you ever used these? - No, I don't trust them, never have. - You don't trust them? - No, 'cause all I can think about is sending these things down the plumbing, and then it gets clogged or creates some back end issue, and I've created a, you know, several thousand dollar problem for somebody. So for me, it's just not worth it. - Egan's a mechanical engineer, and he said that the engineering part of his brain suspects that the flushable claim might be true in a lab, but not in the actual sewage system. - Okay, so it's not just a question about wipes, it's a question about rules, interpretation, and whether this is one where companies are playing fair or not. - Yeah, it's a question about all of those things, but it's also just a question about wipes, because Egan said, he said, look, I've got a lot of doubts. I've seen all kinds of ways that companies can pull fast ones, but at the end of the day, I would love to use this product if it can be proven to me that they are, in fact, safe to flush. - You know, I see the benefit, right? I can't argue with it. So I think if I heard a take that convinced me, I'm open to it. - I have to say, in a moment where the country's in vast national crisis, people have heard about the future, I like the word you're doing some classic podcasting here. - This is the question that search engine listeners are demanding that we answer, and we're heating the call. - So after I spoke to Egan, I did a lot of research, talked to a lot of people. I have what I think is a satisfying answer to Egan's question. I'm gonna start that answer with something I hadn't really understood when I started working on this story, which is just like, where did the flushable wipe even come from? Like, I don't know about you, for me, I didn't know that these products existed, like as recently as a few years ago, like, for me, they were nowhere, and now I kind of see them everywhere, and it seemed like maybe this was like, a product of the pandemic? - Yes, pandemic is the first time, I don't know if I was aware that they existed. I mean, like, definitely baby wipes, but like, flushable wipes, I feel like, the first time they probably made it onto a list of things I meant to purchase, was when we were wiping our groceries. Were you wiping your groceries with flushable wipes? - I was wiping my groceries with something, and I was standing in the aisle that contained the flushable wipes. - Did you flush them after you wiped your groceries? - You know, 2020, some people entered periods of greater mental clarity. Some people entered periods of greater mental fuzzyness. I was a fuzzy guy. My guess is that I was flushing everything down my toilet. I was real like, the world is ending. There's no rules. I didn't wear adults like non-sweat pants for a year and a half. - I was living like a caveman. - I coped in a completely different, but equally insane way, which is that I ate tuna for lunch every day for two years. (laughing) I'm not entirely sure why, but it felt good. And also, mate. So this is a product that, for me, appeared out of nowhere during the pandemic. I definitely didn't grow up with them. I didn't know that the flushability of wipes was a problem that needed solving. And in the long history of toilet hygiene, flushable wipes do come into the picture, pretty late. - When did they come into the picture? - Well, my research took me to some strange places, PJ. I found that in the pre-wipes era, people wiped there, but in all kinds of different ways, the Romans used a stick with a sponge on the end, soaked in vinegar. - Why of vinegar? - Couldn't tell ya. - As it sounds kinda nice. - The Greeks used shards of broken pottery. - I knew that actually. - Why did you know that? - It may happen to read a book. (laughing) - In the Middle East and other parts of Asia, people are just using water and their hands, which sounds like messier, but also probably more effective. - And the Japanese were using bamboo sticks with a cloth on the end. - Okay, so they were kinda doing their version of the sponge on a stick. - That's right, that's right. So it wasn't until-- - I think there's many kinds of technology where I think of it as kind of a backwards invention. Like, technology proceeds forward, but we lose something and it's worse. - Like, things you need to charge to, you don't have to charge before. - Yeah. - I bet that like the ancient Romans, the Japanese would look at us with the thin, thin ply, toilet paper, honor of fingers, but why aren't you using a stick, you guys are crazy. - Well, it's funny, so toilet paper doesn't enter the public record until 600 AD. And this happens in China, a part of the world that famously invented paper a few centuries later there, they're using it in the bathroom. - First thing about paper and then they're like, what do we buy for a bus with this? - But they're looked down on by much of the rest of the world, they're like, look at those gross people using paper to wipe their butts. - Why don't you use a stick with a cloth? - Perhaps that's what they're saying. But anyway, I don't know what you were expecting. You were walking into the air, but I'm gonna keep just throwing toilet facts at you. - Keep going. - This trend of using paper eventually migrates to Europe where the invention of the printing press flooded the market with a whole lot of new paper that like after a while made perfectly good toilet paper. - Oh. - And really, books are kind of standard issue supply of toilet paper for like centuries and most of the Western world. - It's not funny 'cause like one of the worst things you can do, I mean, there's many terrible things you can do, but one of the like sort of socially horrific things you can do is burn a buck. But this all the time people are wiping their butts with them. - You're looking at this BJ with the 2026 brand, not with a 1750 brand. In fact, in the US, the Farmers Almanac specifically marketed itself for the purpose of being a great toilet paper product. - So you would like read the days forecast to be like, I'm done with this. - Exactly. If you look at a Farmers Almanac to this day, there's a hole in the top left corner of the book so that you can nail it up in your outhouse so that you can rip paper out when you need it. - I could see that coming back as a trend honestly. - Eventually in different places at different times, people are producing paper specifically for the purpose of wiping your butt like toilet paper gets invented in the 1800s. And that's kind of been the status quo for the last 150 years, at least in the US. And it's not until the mid 1990s that we see the first major shakeup of toilet paper hegemony. - Which is. - So baby wipes had been invented in the 1950s and slowly over the following decades, the parents doing the butt wiping and the diaper changing, mostly mothers, realized like the stuff's pretty good. Maybe we should start using it for ourselves as the adults in the house. - Wait for like wiping their own butts. - For wiping their own butts. - That's so funny. - But the big problem with this trend is that baby wipes are not flushable. They should not be flushed down a toilet. They're made of plastic-based fibers. So they're gonna create massive plumbing clogs if you try to flush them. So there's a problem here. There's a demand. And in 1996, an enterprising entrepreneur launches product that he thinks is gonna solve the problem. He gives it the unfortunate name more. - Moist mates? - Ooh. - And moist mates is the precursor to the modern flushable wipe. - Moist mates? - I would not go to the store, see a product I've never heard of, read the label, see that it's called moist mates and put it in my cart. - It feels like it should be locked up. - Well, when you look at it, you might feel even more strongly in that direction because imagine a normal roll of toilet paper, except the sheets of paper are perforated wet wipes, designed to disintegrate more easily than like the classic baby wipes, but essentially what you have is wet toilet paper. - Right. - Which is only, the only reason it's a viable, possible product is because baby wipes have accidentally created a market of adult baby wipers. - That's exactly right. And PJ, I know you're a collector of fine vintage goods. You can actually find moist mates on eBay right now for $99.99, I'm just putting a link in there. - $90, like $100? - No, no, no, not $100, $99.99. (laughing) - And I want you to take a look at what it looks like. - Okay, all right, eBay. Moist mates dispenser, 80 sheet roll, rare vintage. The packaging is pretty good. Flushable, hypowallergenic, with aloe. It looks like lily pads, but I guess it's an aloe plant. And then toilet paper roll with fake flour coming out of it. And then they show you what it looks like outside of the box. And it's a plastic dispenser because I think- - They give you, they kind of give you a vault that you put your wet toilet paper in. And so they don't want your wet toilet paper dripping all over your bathroom. So with the roll of wet toilet paper, moist mates is providing you with a plastic vault. - Got it, this seems like a product that doesn't quite. Like it seems like a first draft. It seems like a first-to-market idea, which is exactly what it is. But they do have some modest success, like enough success that in 2001, Kimberly Clark, which is the company that makes cotton nail products, spends $100 million designing their own version of the product, which they end up calling roll wipes. And is all this kind of capitalist fervor because toilet paper, even though you don't think of it as a gold mine, because we use so much of it, if you could innovate there, it's just like luke or beyond your dreams. - I think it's a huge market. If you just think about the number of people on earth using this product every single day, if you can create a product that's going to disrupt the toilet paper industry, you're gonna be able to make a lot of money doing it. - Got it. - Kimberly Clark comes out with roll wipes. They call it the first major innovation in toilet paper in 100 years. Do you want to see a commercial for roll wipes? - Of course they do. (upbeat music) - Bunch people, slow motion, swimmer, slow motion dancers, slow motion shot of a bunch of ladies bathing suit. - Commercials were different in 2001. - To feel truly fresh where it really counts, sometimes wetter is better. - They are. - Nail fresh roll wipes, together with dry toilet paper. These new, pre-moistened wipes on a roll, lead to feeling clean and fresher. - Ew. - It's hard because you can't get past the fact that they're trying to sell you wet toilet paper. - So you, I was eight years old in 2001. You were older than eight years old. - I was older than eight years old. I was 16 and trying to make sense of a post-9/11 America. - In you're trying to make sense of a post-9/11 America, did you encounter roll wipes? - Now, now of all the things I remember from that time, and I remember a lot of things. I do not remember roll wipes. - It's not entirely surprising to me because roll wipes don't last. They're not a smash hit. In fact, within a couple of years, they've already left the shelves. - Was it just like, is your assumption? Because I know this stuff is probably a little hard to historically prove, but the adult baby wipeers just kept adult baby wipe and they didn't seize on any of these new weird products. - That's a theory that I think is a perfectly good one. Another theory that I saw at the time was that like wet toilet paper is both kind of embarrassing and very public for all of your house guests to see. - Exactly, it's like you come over to somebody's house, it's like a sign felled episode, like you go into their guest bathroom and there's just a wet toilet paper to censor? - I don't know what you suspect, but maybe that some sort of unfortunate medical condition is going on in that household? - Yes. - But whatever the reason, flushable wipes sold as rolls, basically completely failed by the mid-2000s, but the companies take the wet rolls from the shelves, but then they slowly replace them with a product that looks a whole lot more, just like what we think of as the flushable wipe today, which is a flat packet of wipes marketed to adults and marketed as flushable. - And it comes in the sort of like, it's got the perforation on top that you reach into and you pull the thing out. - That's right. So Charmin, Procter and Gamble owns the brand Charmin, so they buy the rights to moist mates, rebrand them as fresh mates, and after a failed run as wet rolls of toilet paper, they get redesigned as just the classic flushable wipe we would understand today. Like, you can see them in this commercial from 2005. - Wait a minute, Pierre, you're not done yet. You might not be clean until you use wet. Charmin, fresh mates, you will find is a key. - Okay, okay, I already say, I remember this commercial. - You'll find for a cleaner clean with Charmin, you will find flushable fresh mates, you can get behind. - Okay, so while the jingle is not for me, and I don't care about the Cartoon Bear, I think it's got a nice, it's fine. The thing that they're doing that is correct is the way you convince people to change a consumer product that they buy in this aisle, is you convince them that they're dirty or stinky. Like, hey, not, do you want wet toilet paper, but maybe you've got a dirty butt. - I think that's right. I think also they're now selling you a product that is kind of covert. This isn't replacing your toilet paper roll. It's not right there where your toilet paper that's dry used to be. It's something that you can keep nice and safe on the back of your toilet, and. - People aren't gonna know you're free with a dirty bath, who likes wet toilet paper. - That's right. - You're free with a clean bath, who likes wet toilet paper. - So is this the breakthrough? This is how they finally convince a mass market or some people in it to buy flushable wipes? - It's the beginning of that story. So this is in 2005. By 2005, the thing that we understand as the modern flushable wipe has already been invented, but sales remain pretty modest for a few years. Like, they're on shelves, but they're not flying off of them. But if you look at the market data that changes very quickly in the early 2010s, and one reason for that might be because flushable wipes start getting some pretty strong celebrity endorsements. - From a who? - The actor Terrence Howard, really? - Famously suggested that he would not data woman that did not have wipes in her bathroom. - Did he just say this in an interview? Or was it like sponsored? - No, this was in an interview, and it was a little questionable. I have to say, (laughs) - What a weird standard for Terrence Howard to have. - He wasn't totally alone because a few years later in 2011, will I am waxed poetic on the virtues of flushable wipes to El Magazine? - Huh. - He says, quote, "Get some chocolate, wipe it on a wooden floor, and then try to get it up with some dry towels." You're gonna get chocolate in the cracks. That's why you gotta get those baby wipes. - I, different people's minds think about different things. - I gotta say, it's an effective image because I think he's probably right. I do think that a wet flushable wipe is better at cleaning up a mess than dry toilet paper. - Yeah, well guess what else is in the bathroom here? I think, I'm not gonna use the sink to wipe my butt. - No, you can just wet toilet papers. I've here to buy free wet toilet paper. - But here's the thing, toilet paper is designed to disintegrate immediately when it gets wet. - Not if you clump it up. - That is one of its virtues. That is one of the things that makes it not a problem when you flush down the toilet. - We have a weird culture that makes too many products, but go ahead. - Okay, so it gets some celebrity endorsements, but another probably more important reason that flushable wipes take off in the 2010s is that a brand new company is gonna enter the fray that a lot of people are gonna fall in love with. - Oh. - Do you know what company I'm talking about? - Is it gendered? - It's gendered. - Dude wipes. - Dude wipes is right, so. In 2011, 27 year old guy named Sean Riley living in Chicago decides to launch his own flushable wipe product, Sean Riley. - Just a normal dude. - He'd gone to school for construction management, working in nine to five, but really more of an entrepreneur at heart. - I just have to say, I'm glad that you went to journalism school to do this story because I have so often been like, what is the deal with dude wipes? - I can tell you the deal with dude wipes. - So I reached out to dude wipes to ask if someone there would talk to us. They politely declined, but the founder Sean Riley shows up in a lot of interviews giving his origin story. - So tell me the story. Like how you were sitting around in 2012, or I guess probably right before 2012, and with some wipes with some buddies. So tell me how you decided that you were gonna go and disrupt an industry. - You know, we were basically in like an animal house after college, so there was tons of guys coming through. There was five guys living there, three on the couch, and we were packing the bathrooms of baby wipes, and we just noticed everyone was getting hooked on them. A couple people had used them before. I was buying them from Sam's club, just putting in the bathroom like I used baby wipes, and if he came this obvious habit people were getting this funny conversation. So we were like, let's make the brand dude wipes. - Sean Riley decides to launch a very loud flushable wipe brand called Dude wipes, marketed specifically to men, and really the innovation here isn't so much on the product side, although he will make efforts to make the wipes bigger and more durable, and over time, even perhaps more flushable. - It's branding. - But the real innovation is branding. And this is why the story of Dude wipes matters here, because the rise of flushable wipes is at its core a marketing story, it's how an entire industry convinced a lot of people to use its weird new product, and Dude wipes is better at this than maybe anybody else. - You know, we're coming out with butt wipes for guys, and it's like, you know, it seemed a little awkward, we're like, no, like guys could get into this. This obviously a cleaner way, we all believed in that. So we had to make trouble. a different, you know, for that customer Alpego. So first few years, dude, I've kind of lumping along like most startups do, but in 2015 they catch a big break, which is that they get a spot on Shark Tank. Oh. Hi, Shark's. My name's Sean Riley, and I'm here with my good friends, Ryan Meaghan, and Jeff Umkowski, and we're the guys of Dude Products, hailing from Chicago, Illinois. But you can just call us the dudes, dude. And we're here today seeking-- He, like, he, Sean Riley and his two guys, they just look-- they look like dudes. They look like dudes. They're wearing shirts as they dudes on, and one of them has a backwards hat. One of them has, like, I don't want to call it a fo-hawk, but that sort of fo-hockey-esque haircut. They have, like, very median builds. They're just dudes. And they've got a toilet on screen that's packed high with dude wipes. That the sharks seem charmed. Sharks. Are you still wiping the old fashioned way with just toilet paper? If so, you're a chump, and your ass probably hates you for it. But hey, what's a dude to do? You could try some baby wipes. But we're not babies. We're dudes. So we created the award-winning dude wipes. They're the very first wipes for, well, dudes. They're flushable, bowed and gradeable, have soothing yellow, and they answer to every dude's prayers. Okay. So it's like, it's both that they're marketing to men, but also, they're aware that there's something funny about what they're doing. And it's a little bit fun or uncomfortable to talk about. And maybe that gives it a little bit of energy that will make people pay attention to it. I think that's right. I think that's the bet they're making. And while it is not a bet that I think pays off on me personally, I do think it's a bet that ultimately paid off for them. Because at the end of this shark tank segment, they end up getting a pretty significant investment from Mark Cuban. And that capital, along with the exposure on TV, ends up giving them some momentum that they're able to capitalize on during the pandemic. I see. So when people just need wipes, they remember the brand dude wipes. And that's like, that's like a hot moment for them. I think really, maybe even more than that, the pandemic is just a moment where, because of the crazy country that we live in, when something like a pandemic hits, we run the one toilet paper. And so people were forced to look for alternatives. Oh, I totally blocked that out. I ran out and bought a $20 bidet, but I think a lot of people ran out and bought flushable wipes, which were not scarce on shelves. Like they were still there on the toilet paper aisle, but not completely sold out. I see. And so a lot of people were introduced to flushable wipes for the first time during the pandemic, during the toilet paper shortage. I see. So the stuff I was buying the week down my groceries, they were buying us a toilet paper alternative. And they were buying it because they were forced to. But then some portion of them try it like it and become consumers. Yeah, apparently a pretty significant portion of them try it like it and become consumers. Because after a few years, dude wipes is a brand worth over $300 million. That's crazy. It's crazy. So dude wipes has gotten so big that they're no longer just marketing themselves as a toilet paper supplement, because flushable wipes in this area are known as sort of the finishing wipe. It's the last wipe. You'll use your dry toilet paper, but then to make sure you're squeaky clean, use a flushable wipe to end it. Dude wipes is getting a little cocky. They are now coming to replace your toilet paper. In fact, I visited their website this morning and was confronted with what I felt was honestly a pretty decent argument, which is what I said, quote, you wouldn't wash your face with a dry washcloth. Why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Because poop's wet. You're relying on the wetness of your feces to ensure that it's clean. That argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make a door to dude wipes out. So I guess this is the point where I have to ask you if you've ever used a flushable wipe to wipe yourself after using a bathroom? No, if you must know what I have done is on the final wipe, wet a piece of toilet paper, like a normal, I thought, person. Are you getting up taking the toilet paper to the sink and then returning to the toilet? You bet. And that is despicable. I've been distinctly warned against saying this on air, but I use a bidet and I love a bidet and I think it's crazy that everybody doesn't have a bidet. I have used bidets and loved bidets. By a bidet, I will clarify. I don't mean like a high tech Japanese computer that sings "Congratulations, you poop song." I mean, literally even just like the simple host, the host by the toilet. Okay, so Peter, I used flushable wipes for the first time this morning. Was it a revelation? Well, I have to say they're not totally for me and it's because the end of your product experience is like yes, you're very clean, but you're also kind of wet, which is my problem with the days. You use it, you get clean, but then you're just sitting there kind of wet. It is a problem. I feel like it's just not my ideal bathroom experience. I feel like the bathroom experience is still actually open to disruption. But with the dude wipe, you end up with like a wet butt and a dirty adult baby wipe. Yes, but because they are marketed as flushable wipes, what you are then instructed to do as a consumer is to take that wipe and flush it down the toilet like toilet paper. Which returns us to our question. That's right, can you? I do think that I am in the minority and not falling in love with dude wipes. Like I think a lot of people who are using flushable wipes really like them. And I think there are a whole lot of people like our listener Egan who are avoiding flushable wipes, not because they can't imagine liking them, but because they don't actually believe that they're flushable. They think an American company would lie to make money. Egan, Egan, Egan, the engineer is familiar with the dissonance between marketing and reality. Okay. So as I kept looking into this, I found that this question, the question of are flushable wipes actually flushable? I found that it's an exceptionally difficult question to answer. It's a question that is being debated in courtrooms and city council meetings and local governments. In courtrooms? Courtrooms. There are lawsuits being issued all across the country on this topic. And I'm going to tell you about both sides, both the prosecution and the defense. And I'm going to start with the prosecution. After the break, I go to the scene of the crime. It's getting a little stinkier. [Music] Okay, so PJ, yes. Tell me, guide me through this debate. I got in touch with one of the most passionate public servants I've ever met. The former deputy commissioner of New York City's Bureau of Wastewater Treatment, Pam Lardo. My name is Pam Lardo. I am a longtime environmentalist and avert in environmental regulatory field and wastewater treatment field for over 40 years. Pam is a longtime wastewater expert who spent the bulk of her career on the west coast before getting the call to run. What is almost certainly the most complex wastewater system in the country in New York cities. And Pam told me that if I wanted to understand how flushable wipes were a problem for our wastewater system, I would need to first understand how the wastewater system actually worked. Does that mean like go into the sewers where the Ninja Turtles live? I didn't myself go into the sewers where the Ninja Turtles live, but Pam has spent her career thinking about and working on the sewers. When I graduated college, I went and I joined the Peace Corps and I built water systems and built toilet systems in remote areas of the country of Nepal. And you've got to imagine, I don't know if people can imagine, what it's like to live without clean water and the toilet takes on child and infant mortality. So experiencing all that, it made me realize how much we take back for granted here, how much we undervalue it, how important it is, and to convey the importance in a place where it's taken for granted has been part of the passion of what I pursue now. I just want to say that the story of modern wastewater management was to me at least one of the most important innovations I'd never really given any thought to. I think it's at least in the conversation for thing that's had the biggest impact on quality of life in human history. And so I just asked Pamelaardo to explain to me how the system worked. Like I flush something down the toilet, help me follow that flush step by step. Like what happens next? Where does it go? What happens to it? Thank you for asking, because one of my goals in life is that every single person knows what happens after they flush. I'm so happy I can hope. Yes. All right. So you flush, it goes out out your toilet. And there's a local line that connects to a bigger line under your straight that collects all the wastewater from your neighbors. And that goes to a bigger line, which is called a trunk line that is directed to a treatment plant. So that's the collection system. Okay. Over 7,000 miles of wastewater pipes in New York City. Okay. So that's the collection. And then it ends up in the treatment facility. What happens in the treatment facility? So glad you're asking, because you're a human, and you use a toilet. And therefore you have a moral obligation to go visit a treatment plant. Preferably the one that you pooped to. So PJ, I took Pam's moral imperative seriously. Hey, how's it going? I'm going to be doing some of the tours today. Okay. Search engine producer Emily Malterra and I actually went to visit a treatment plant. Yeah, then get ready. and you're the podcast crew. - That's right. - Cool. - And our tour guide was a guy named Evan, who was an engineer at the plant. It's a plant in Brooklyn called the New Town Creek. - Oh, I know. Is it the one where it's like two silver giant domes? - They look like space age football helmets. - I know. It's such a cool. - Yes. - It's a building looks like it's like sort of like Area 52 or something. And the first time you find out it's wastewater treatment, you're like holy moly, it's crazy. - Yes, it's very cool. - So we treat waste from Brooklyn and Manhattan, this building right here is where our Manhattan waste enters the plant. We're gonna go to the bar screens right now, but that's just for-- - Okay, first step is preliminary treatment. There's screening systems to take out things that are in the flow that dump a lot in there. And the screens are just like metal grates basically? - Yeah, they look like bars like would be in like a jail. The most common design are called bar screens. - If you look down there, you're gonna see the bars. Why we call it a bar screen down at the very bottom. So that's what physically impacts all the problems. - So anything that can't pass through the bar screens is just getting scraped up here basically to discard? - Yes, just to get brought to the landfill from here, things like toilet paper will break down to the-- - There's a million other things that people flush that they should not. So people should not be flushing, tampons, condoms. I heard that once in New York City, they found a handgun. We do find money, dollar bills. - Like cash. - Cash, yeah, someone's wallet gets flush somehow. I don't know. And I'm like, if it's not a 20, I'm not going after it. - Right, but you find stuff. - So what happens next few days is basically what they're doing is they're taking what would happen in a natural environment and trying to recreate it in the plant just in a much more accelerated way. So the goal is to separate the liquids from the solids and you take the liquid, you treat it as we talked about. You polish out most of the dangerous bacteria and just end it back into a receiving water like the East River. And the output from the solids is called sludge. Some of which can be used as fertilizer, some of which has to go to a landfill. And there's also one more byproduct, which is biogas. Some of which gets fed back into the system to heat homes. - So some people in New York City, where they realize they're not, their apartment heat is coming from a biogas created as a byproduct from cleaning wastewater. - I think it's a pretty small percentage, but knowing that this is technically possible, it's the kind of thing that they could scale up. And I think they're actively working on scaling it up. But to return to our listener question here, as I was learning about this enormous system, part of me found it hard to believe that like five cent wipes would be that big of a deal for what sounded like an insanely sophisticated machine. Like I was at this space age looking facility that knew how to turn sewage into gas that could heat your home. But Pamela was probably better equipped than anyone I had yet talked to to answer this question for our listener, so I just asked her. - We got a question from a listener about a product that he feels he's been getting conflicting information about. He sees flushable wipes in the store. And so he just wanted to know like very simply, can you flush a flushable wipe? - Okay, you're the person on the other side of the system that these flushable wipes are occasionally entering. - Yes. - What is your answer to that question? - No. - Pamelaardo, former head of wastewater management and the most complicated wastewater system in the world said unequivocally flushable wipes not safe to flush. - Not safe to flush? - Not safe to flush. - No, okay. And this is where things have changed a little bit since I was at New York City, but not that much. It has not changed my stance on this. - There's claims that there are some flushable wipes out there that work. And I think that, you know, it's lottable I guess. It's like cool, you know? - You sound a little skeptical. - Of course I am. I just like the idea of if it doesn't come out of you, it doesn't belong in the Lou. (laughing) - You just like the rhyme of it all. - But I'm just saying the truth. Besides toilet paper, toilet paper is good. - So Pam described the kinds of problems flushable wipes could create in a municipal wastewater system. The first thing they can do is they can just create a simple clog like for your building or for a pumping station and clogs cost money to fix. In the war extreme cases, flushable wipes can contribute to, I think what can only be described is one of the nastiest unintended consequences of human innovation in history. They're called fat birds. - What's a fat bird? - It's a portmento of fat and iceberg. And a fat bird is when fats, oils and greases that end up in our wastewater system combined with non-biodegradables like wipes to create a very disgusting clog. (dramatic music) Can I show you one? - Yeah, please. - All right, wait, I'm loading it up. - 130 ton fat bird causing stink in London sewers. This is gonna be really nasty. - Below the surface of England's capital city lies a dark and disgusting problem. - It smells pretty unpleasant. In the 150 year old sewers of East London, a huge massive waste known as a fat bird is blocking a substantial stretch of the system. - Oh, it's really gross. It looks like it's like an open shot of the sewer paper, but it looks like somebody made ice cream out of fat, feces and sludge. - The fat bird is formed of a mixture of fats, oils and greases, mixed with lots of sanitary items like wet wipes, and they congeal together to form this concrete light blockage. - It weighed as much as 11 double-decker buses, which is a hilariously British way to measure the weight of some things. (laughing) It was over 800 feet long. It took nine weeks to clear, and it cost the city a whole lot of money to clear it. - And fudgeable wipes are like one of the ingredients that helps create a fat bird. They're like the base layer, and then it just like starts soaking up oil and fat and everything. That is the accusation being made by municipal waste water officials. (dramatic music) - So fudgeable wipes, according to the people who ought to know, are not flushable. It's kind of an example of a negative externality. It's like a cost is being borne elsewhere in the system, not by the people who are making the choice. - Well, because these are municipal systems, the costs are being eventually paid by the people that live there. I mean, your rates are going up because the city department, that your taxpayer dollars are having eventually to pay for the problems that you are creating by flushing stuff down the toilet that you should. - No, I'm not doing this. I've never used a flushable wipe. - But that's not all PJ. - Oh. - If it doesn't create a clog in a pipe, and it doesn't contribute to a mass fed bird, it can end up at the gates of a wastewater treatment plant as we discussed. - Oh, at the like border thing. - At the front door, at the jail bars. - Interesting. - When I went to the wastewater facility, I solved the metal grids with my own eyes and Evan, the plant engineer who was giving us the tour, showed me all the stuff that they were pulling up. - Just from the eye test, it's 99% wet wipes. The only other thing I see is one bag of chips, and then another piece of plastic. - And I have to say, we saw dumpsters upon dumpsters, full of what just looked like, a great mass of wipe-looking things. This is just at one facility. Wastewater officials that I spoke to said that they spent across the entire system, something like $20 million a year on the wipe's problem. - Things like toilet paper will break down to the point where they flow right through these bar screens, so they don't get impacted at all. And it's only these non-woven textile flushable wipes that are gonna be flushed. - You put the word flushable in air quotes. - Yeah, that won't come through on the audio, but yes. - So you could see the point in the system where the flushable wipes were not flushable. - I was seeing the point in the system where wipes were ending up where they shouldn't have been. The clear evidence that some wipes being flushed were not dispersing in the wastewater system, whether or not they were wipes marketed as flushable or wipes marketed as not flushable. I can't say, but I think at this point, I'm gonna share with you a graph that Pamolardo shared with me. - Okay. - And I just wanna see what you make of it. So Pamolardo sent me a graph that to her is evidence that flushable wipes are contributing to-- - This is quite damning. - The kinds of problems that municipal wastewater agencies are dealing with. - So it's just, it's two lines. One is monthly screenings, which I guess is them having to pull stuff out of the filter screen. - That's right. - So that goes, it's sort of hockey sticks up. And it hockey sticks up almost directly in line with the introduction of flushable wipes under the market and their growth in sales. Like they're very, I know, correlation causation aren't always the same, but they're very, very tightly mapped. - This feels like, I mean, as close as you're gonna be able to get to certainty, which is like, you have a graph showing that there's a direct link between the rise and sales of flushable wipes and these clogs, you have the former head of the wastewater in New York City saying the wipes are a problem. And then you're seeing with your own eyes the great that's supposed to keep non-fluschable things out of the treatment and it's filled with wipes of unknown origin. - This is the point at which I need to tell you about the other side of this argument, which is-- - There's another group of people who very much do not agree with Pamela Ardose reading of the case. - Like Dude Wipe? - Big wipes, that's right. The wipes industry does not take kindly to all of these accusations and implications being bandied about by the wastewater folks. And honestly, they have some pretty convincing arguments on their side. After the break, the defense. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Can you say your name and what you do? - My name's Wes Fisher. I'm the director of government affairs for Indo, the association of the non-woven fabrics industry. - So to understand the other side of this debate, I got in touch with Wes Fisher, who spends a lot of his time thinking about flushable wipes, which apparently falls into a trade category called non-woven fabrics. - Non-woven's are a kind of subset of the textile industry. I tell people it's like if textiles and paper making had a baby. So we represent products all up and down the supply chain, as well as wipes. Be it a big chunk of the products we represent. - Wes Fisher, very good at his job. - I posed him our listener question the same way I posed it to Pamelaardo. He just wanted to know very simply, can you flush a flushable wipe? - The answer is yes, absolutely. If it's in the United States on a shelf and it says it's flushable, it has passed a lot of different standards and tests and held up to a lot of scrutiny to make that claim. And he said unequivocally flushable wipes, totally safe to flush. - Okay. - Not surprising, this is a longstanding position in a longstanding battle between municipal waste water officials in the wipes industry. This is a battle that boils down to standards, which sounds kind of boring and it kind of is, but it's very important to the story here. So just to explain very quickly, India created a set of standards on what a product has to do in order for it to be quote flushable. And is it like how easily is it destroyed in liquid? - That's right. Among some other things, mostly what it boils down to is how quickly is this product going to disperse when it hits a sewage system? Municipal waste water agencies say that that standard is not nearly rigorous enough to simulate real world conditions. Like that products could meet that standard and still cause problems for our systems. So clean water agencies developed their own competing standard that they say product should have to meet in order to be called flushable. But the kickers that those more rigorous standards would be much more expensive for the manufacturers to meet. And so they didn't want to do it. More than that, they say they don't need to do it. They say that their standards are fine and that the real culprits here are the non-flushable wipes that these pesky consumers are flushing down their toilet anyway. And on that theory of the case, if you're trying to make sense of that graft that Pamelaardo shared, I mean, one way of looking at it is that when flushable wipes hit the market and you have brands like dude wipes really popping off on social media, you're now creating a consumer expectation that it is safe to flush things down your toilet besides the things that have historically been safe to flush down your toilet. - Oh, so the other argument would be that once people started flushing flushable wipes, even if the wipes weren't causing problems, maybe now they're flushing paper towels. Like you just opened the door. - I mean, if I think about it like from my own dumb brain, if I start seeing flushable wipes on the market, I think I'm like maybe the sewage system's gotten better and it can handle more stuff. - No, maybe I can start flushing all kinds of things down the toilet. Like it's 20 to 20-- - Did you start flushing all kinds of things down the toilet? - I did, I'm pretty conservative flusher. But like, you know, there's one way of looking at this that says flushable wipes create a kind of consumer behavior that becomes problematic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that flushable wipes are problematic themselves. - Couldn't you test it though? I mean, couldn't you like die all the flushable wipes red or something and then figure out if they're hitting the grate? - Well, the first thing that happens in this fight between municipal waste water agencies and wipes manufacturers is a lawsuit that gets issued in 2015. The confusingly named town of Wyoming, Minnesota. - What? (laughing) - Oh, it's next to Pennsylvania, Texas. (laughing) - That's right. - So Wyoming, Minnesota sews the giants, Proctor and Gamble, Kimberly Clark, several other defendants are named. Importantly, they're suing for compensatory damages. Essentially, they're asking for the wipes manufacturers to pay millions of dollars in damages for all the broken pumps and jetted pipes and all that stuff. But suing for compensatory damages requires a very specific kind of evidence. Like, essentially, you have to prove that this specific company's wipe created this specific clog that resulted in that specific bill. Like, it's created a very specific, or a campaign paragraph. - Or a campaign paragraph. - You have to, really. - Exactly. You can't say, "Look, as wipes sales went up, "so to did the cubic feet of waste "that we were having to discard from these facilities, "you have to prove some sort of causal connection." - So did they try to? - Well, Wyoming, Minnesota, as the first mover in this fight, doesn't really think about that ahead of time. They get into this lawsuit and pretty quickly, the industry's lawyers come up with a pretty simple defense, which is exactly what you and I have been discussing. They're saying, "Sewers are messy. "People flush all kinds of stuff down the drain. "You can't prove that art specific products "are causing the specific clogs that you're suing us over." And evidently, the argument works because Wyoming, Minnesota, ends up dismissing the suit in 2018. - Okay, but that's just saying, you guys have not proved this in a legal liability sense. It's not saying you're not causing a problem. The court's answering a more narrow question. - The court is saying, "You have not proved "the thing that you would need to prove to win this suit." - Okay, so what happens next? - So, the Wyoming Minnesota case is a very big win for vice manufacturers. It's a win that would be bolstered by a few forensic studies that in the trade organization would conduct over the next few years. West Fisher, the director of government affairs and that told me about one of those studies. He said, "If you wanted proof "that flushable wipes were safe to flush, "you could just look at the clogs themselves." - We sampled 1700 products in California at two facilities, one in Northern and one in Southern California and categorized every single wipe that came out of that system. We had a binder of every wipe we could conceivably think would be on the market in California. There was not a single one we couldn't identify. - And what did they find? - In the study, they find of everything that ended up caught in a bar screen at a wastewater treatment facility. 34% of the material were wipes that were not designed to be flushed and were not marketed as flushable. - So, like baby wipes? - Baby wipes. 65% of the material were other non-flushable items. Paper towels, tampons, trash. An astonishingly low, one percent of the material were products marketed as flushable wipes. - Only 0.9% were flushable wipes that were in the process of falling apart. Everything else was a fully intact wipe, feminine hygiene product, or over 50% were paper towels. - That looks pretty, if you trust the study and if you trust that you can extrapolate it, that actually looks pretty good for them. I trust the study that did this in collaboration with wastewater authorities and so it's basically wastewater agencies and a Clean Water Association coming together with the wipes trade organization to fund a study, to forensically look at a clog and they're saying, this is what we're finding. - And wait, what year is this? 2023. - Yeah, that looks pretty good for them. - And I'll just say, there's been a few studies done and these findings that this California study found are remarkably consistent elsewhere. In every forensic study that I've seen, wipes identifiable as flushable wipes make up less than 2% of the clogs. - So wait, so now yours are leaning towards maybe these wipes are flushable? - I mean, from the industry's perspective, it's like, why are you coming after flushable wipes when 99% of the issue that you guys are mad about is coming from other stuff? - I find that to be kind of persuasive. I'm not persuasive enough that I'm gonna go by flushable wipes, but like I wouldn't, I think prior to knowing that piece of information, if I walked into someone's bathroom and saw that they had flushable wipes, I would think, oh, they're not being great to this end. - Yeah, you look at that study and you're like, this seems like maybe there's nothing here. - Yeah. - I think from the municipal wastewater perspective though, like I think one maybe some of them would try to push back on the findings of those studies in some ways. Like there's a sense that even if flushable wipes aren't the biggest offender here at the wastewater treatment plant, like there's still an ingredient in the fat bergs and the clogs and all the stuff that the wastewater folks ate dealing with further upstream. But the next big fight, and this is the decisive one, PJ, the next fight happens in Charleston in 2021. Charleston had been dealing with the same problems that every other municipal wastewater authority had been dealing with for the previous decade, including their very own fat berg in 2018. They reportedly had to send divers down 90 feet into raw sewage to physically pull out the massive wipes. - God. - And honestly, at this point, I don't even know if they believe flushable wipes are really a meaningful part of the problem forensically or if they just thought that maybe flushable wipes being marketed as flushable wipes were influencing consumer behavior in a negative way. But what seemed clear is that they saw flushable wipes as the part of the problem that they could take aim at legally and have a shot at winning, because like how are you gonna sue manufacturers of non flushable wipes? Like they're not making any claims that you disagree with. - Yeah. - So Charleston files a class action lawsuit on behalf of municipal wastewater authorities everywhere. Very importantly, they took a different legal strategy than Wyoming Minnesota did. When Wyoming Minnesota sued for compensatory damages, they created this very difficult burden of proof. Charleston instead sues for injunctive relief, which means they're asking them to, they're not saying you have to pass for the damage you cause. There's a saying to the court, please just make them stop. - Yeah, they're not asking for like money for past behavior. They're asking for a change in future behavior. - Yeah. - That lowers the burden of proof. Like instead of having to forensically prove this wipe caused that bill, They only have to prove that. that the current flushability claims are in some way deceptive and harmful to the public interest, which is a little bit easier to get at legally. - And so do they win? - Well, to me, Charleston's prospects looked a lot better than Wyoming Minnesota's from the jump, enough so that just three months after filing the suit, they reached a settlement with the biggest player in the game at this point, which is Kimberly Clark. - Yeah. - The settlement has pretty massive implications. Kimberly Clark agrees to a couple of things. One, they agreed to adopt the more rigorous standards developed by clean water agencies. - Oh. - And two, they agreed to put much more prominent do-not-flush labels on all of their non-flushable wipes, like both on the front of the package and at the point of extraction, they agreed to put a very clear do-not-flush. - So non-flushable wipes are now labeled non-flushable wipes and flushable wipes in the aftermath of this lawsuit have become more flushable. Huge win for municipal wastewater authorities. - Congratulations Charleston. - So, this looks like a brilliant move by Charleston, but it's also probably a brilliant move by Kimberly Clark because the settlement would cost them far less than it would cost their competitors, essentially. I mean, Kimberly Clark, the biggest player in this industry is already closer to meeting the more rigorous standards than all of the other wipes out there. They apparently have this proprietary technology that allows it to meet these more rigorous standards more easily than some of its competitors had technology to do, and so by settling, this makes it a lot harder for Kimberly Clark's competitors to win the suit because now the biggest player in the industry has just proved that this is technically workable, and so you can't say these municipal wastewater agencies are demanding this rigorous standard that would never be possible in the real world. - Kimberly Clark is saying it. - Yeah, we can do it, we got it, catch up. And so, Kimberly Clark's competitors try to put a stop to the settlement, they try to appeal to the judge to say this is prejudicial, the settlement is inappropriate. - Oh wow. - You can't do this, and the judge is like, yes I can. (laughing) And so what that means is that the other defendants remained in suit with Charleston beyond their competitor, Kimberly Clark. In fact, dude wipes who was not originally among the defendants gets hit with a separate suit by Charleston after the Kimberly Clark settlement, and in 2024 and 2025, all of these other major players reached their own settlement with Charleston. - Charleston water system is celebrating a victory in a class action lawsuit that will finally hold flushable wipes companies accountable for the damage their products can cause to the pipes. - Are they also adhering to the municipal standards for flushable wipes? - The terms of the settlement look very similar to the terms of the settlement by Kimberly Clark. - I see, so for the past few years, the leading manufacturer was making more flushable wipes and better labeling their non flushable wipes, but nobody else was. What it looks like where on the cusp of is like a brand new day where non flushable wipes will be better labeled, and it's possible if you believe that the standard that the cities have put forth will actually work, flushable wipes in general might be about to get more flushable. - As best as I can tell, by the middle of 2026, flushable wipes marketed as flushable wipes on shelves should be according to clean water agencies safer to flush, and maybe more importantly, non flushable wipes are going to have a big fat, do not flush label on the packaging. (upbeat music) - It's funny, sometimes I think this is a country where nothing ever gets better and we can't solve our problems, but look at us. - We might be a country of lawyers, but sometimes, eventually, the lawyers might be right. - The lawyers get to a good compromise. - Yeah. Huh. (upbeat music) - Garrett Graham, he's the senior producer on our show. His hope is that in exchange for the hours of his life, he has now spent pondering the notion of what is flushable. At least one search engine listener will stop flushing baby wipes or paper towels in their toilet. Only you can prevent fat birds. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ vote, and truthy, pinimini. Garrett Graham is our senior producer, Emily Maltaher is our associate producer. Special thanks this week to Barry Orr, Cynthia Finley from Nakwa, Angela Delilo from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and all the folks at the Newtown Creek wastewater resource recovery facility. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. This episode is fact checked by Mary Mathis. Our executive producer is Leah Restennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Mora Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Schaff. If you'd like to support our show, get ad free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes. Please consider signing up for incognito mode at search engine nutshell. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)